Francesca Bregoli

Francesca Bregoli is assistant professor of history at Queens College-CUNY, where she also holds the Joseph and Oro Halegua chair in Greek and Sephardic Jewish Studies. She received a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Jewish Art and Material Culture from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and her undergraduate degree in Hebrew and Jewish Studies from the University of Venice (Italy). Before joining the Department of History at Queens College, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford (UK).

Her research concentrates on eighteenth-century Italian and Sephardi Jewish history. She is the author of "Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform" (Stanford University Press, 2014). The book provides a new view on Jewish interaction with Enlightenment culture and the reforming-absolutist state by focusing on the Jews of Livorno, a thriving free port on the Mediterranean Sea. Her second project focuses on the creation and preservation of ties in transnational Jewish families whose members were scattered in the Mediterranean area.